OTT Research Study Finds Lack of a Standard Experience

FOSTER CITY, CALIF.—OTT is an increasingly vital part of the broadcast industry, but as a new research study supported by Conviva and MTM revealed, there isn’t a set approach that OTT players are using right now.

The study explored OTT operational best practices from leading publishers in EMEA and North America. Specifically, it looked at how much time and effort is expended to both discover and fix service delivery issues, like high buffering, low bitrates and slow video start times. The original goal of the study, according to Conviva, was to find commonalities across publishers to establish economic benchmarks.

However, the report makes the claim that there is no such thing as a “typical OTT publisher.” While the broadcast industry has adopted common standards and practices for delivering content, OTT publishers utilize a variety of approaches for managing video delivery in an attempt to provide viewers with a high quality of experience.

There was industry agreement on what the industry considers its most difficult operation tasks, performing root cause analysis. This covers areas like re-buffering or stream failures. Most respondents also agreed that automation or machine learning would help them with diagnosing the root cause of any problem.

According to Conviva and MTM, the results present a great opportunity for industry trade groups, like the Streaming Video Alliance, to establish industry-wide standards on what constitutes a high-quality streaming video experience, as well as an opportunity to share knowledge and best practices with peers on operating, alerting and issue resolution. “This could improve the quality of streaming video across the industry, potentially accelerating the overall growth of OTT streaming video,” the official press release said.